23.Braddock's Defeat: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Braddock's
Defeat
Unless you're a professional sports addict
and know that Joe Montana, greatest
quarterback of the modern era, went to Waverly school in Monongahela, or
that Ron Neccai, only man in modern
baseball history to strike out every batter on the opposing team for a whole game did, too, or that Ken
Griffey Jr. went to its high school as well,
you can be forgiven if you never heard of Monongahela. But once upon a
time at the
beginning of our national history, Monongahela
marked the forward edge of a new nation,
a wilder West than ever the more familiar West became. Teachers on a frontier cannot be bystanders.
Custer's Last Stand in Montana had no military
significance. Braddock's Last Stand near
Monongahela, on the other hand, changed American history forever because
it proved that the invincible British
could be taken. And twenty-one years later we did take them, an accomplishment the French and Spanish,
their principal rivals, had been unable to do.
Why that happened, what inspiration allowed crude colonials to succeed
where powerful and polished nations
could not, is so tied up with Monongahela that I want to bring the moment back for you. It will make a useful
reference point, you'll see, as we consider the
problem of modern schooling. Without Braddock's defeat we would never
have had a successful American
revolution; without getting rid of the British, the competence of ordinary people to educate themselves would
never have had a fair test.
In
July of 1755, at the age of twenty-three, possessing no university degrees, the
alumnus of no military academy, with
only two years of formal schooling under his belt, half- orphan George Washington was detailed an
officer in the Virginia militia to accompany
an English military expedition moving to take the French fort at the forks
of the Monongahela and Allegheny, the
point that became Pittsburgh. His general, Edward Braddock, was an aristocrat commanding a
well-equipped and disciplined force
considerably superior to any possible resistance. Braddock felt so
confident of success, he dismissed the
advice of Washington to put aside traditional ways of European combat in the New World.
On July 9, 1755, two decades and one year
before our Revolution commenced under the
direction of the same Washington, Braddock executed a brilliant textbook
crossing of the Monongahela near the
present Homestead High Bridge by Kennywood amusement park. With fife and drum firing the martial spirit,
he led the largest force in British colonial
America, all in red coats and polished metal, across the green river
into the trees on the farther bank.
Engineers went ahead to cut a road for men and cannon.
Suddenly the advance guard was enveloped
in smoke. It fell back in panic. The main
body moved up to relieve, but the groups meeting, going in opposite
directions, caused pandemonium. On both
sides of the milling redcoats, woods crackled with hostile gunfire. No enemy could be seen, but soldiers
were caught between waves of bullets
fanning both flanks. Men dropped in bunches. Bleeding bodies formed
hills of screaming flesh, accelerating
the panic.
Enter George, the Washington almost unknown to
American schoolchildren. Making his way
to Braddock, he asked permission to engage the enemy wilderness fashion; permission denied. Military theory held that
allowing commands to emanate from
inferiors was a precedent more dangerous than bullets. The British were
too well trained to fight out of
formation, too superbly schooled to adapt to the changing demands of the new situation. When my grandfather took me to
the scene of that battle years after on the
way to Kennywood, he muttered without explanation, "Goddamn bums
couldn't think for themselves." Now
I understand what he meant.
The
greatest military defeat the British ever suffered in North America before
Saratoga was underway. Washington's
horse was shot from under him, his coat ripped by bullets. Leaping onto a second horse, his hat was
lifted from his head by gunfire and the second
horse went down. A legend was in the making on the Monongahela that day,
passed to Britain, France, and the
colonies by survivors of the battle. Mortally wounded, Braddock released his command. Washington led the
retreat on his hands and knees, crawling
through the twilight dragging the dying Braddock, symbolic of the
imminent death of British rule in
America.
Monongahela began as a town fourteen years
later, crossing point for a river ferry
connecting to the National Road (now Route 40) which began,
appropriately enough, in the town of
Washington, Pennsylvania. In 1791, leaders of the curious "Whiskey Rebellion" met in Monongahela about a
block from the place I was born; Scots-Irish
farmers sick of the oppression of federal rule in the new republic spoke
of forging a Trans-Allegheny nation of
free men. Monongahela might have been its capital had they succeeded. We know these men were taken
seriously back East because Washington,
who as general never raised an army larger than 7,000 to fight the
British, as president assembled 13,000
in 1794 to march into western Pennsylvania to subdue the Whiskey rebels. Having fought with them as comrades,
he knew the danger posed by these wild
men of the farther forests was no pipedream. They were descendants of
the original pioneers who broke into the
virgin forest, an evergreen and aggressive strain of populism ran through their group character.
Monongahela appears in history as a place
where people expected to make their own
luck, a place where rich and poor talked face to face, not through
representatives. In the 1830s it became
a way station on the escape route from Horace Mann — style Whiggery, the notion that men should be bound minutely
by rules and layered officialdom.
Whiggery was a neo-Anglican governing idea grown strong in reaction to
Andrew Jackson's dangerous democratic revolution.
Whigs brought us forced schooling before
they mutated into both Democrats and Republicans; history seemed to tell
them that with School in hand their
mission was accomplished. Thousands of Americans, sensibly fearing the worst, poured West to get clear
of this new British consciousness coming
back to life in the East, as if the spirit of General Braddock had
survived after all. Many of the new
pilgrims passed through Mon City on the road to a place that might allow them to continue seeing things their own
way.
Each group passing through on its western
migration left a testament to its own particular yearnings — there are no less than
twenty-three separate religious denominations in Monongahela, although less than 5,000 souls
live in the town. Most surprising of all, you
can find there world headquarters of an autonomous Mormon sect, one that
didn't go to Nauvoo with the rest of
Smith's band but decamped here in a grimier Utopia. Monongahela Mormons never accepted polygamy.
They read the Book of Mormon a different
way. From 1755 until the Civil War, the libertarianism of places like Monongahela set the tone for the most
brilliant experiment in self-governance the modern world has ever seen. Not since the end of the
Pippin Kings in France had liberty been so
abundantly available for such a long time. A revolution in education was
at hand as knowledge of the benefits of
learning to the vigor of the spirit spread far and wide across America. Formal schooling played a part in
this transformation, but its role was far from decisive. Schooled or not, the United
States was the best-educated nation in human
history — because it had liberty.
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